Strangers in a Familiar Land

A few weeks ago, the comment was made in class that people might be better off if our poor were refugees of hunger in each other’s countries. This article makes the case not precisely for this circumstance, but for the opening of all borders, everywhere. The potentials of this as laid out in the article are mouth-watering: a doubled world GDP, incredible amounts of anti-poverty aid happening naturally as border disparities normalize, and freedom from expensive vigilance of borders and those that cross them. It seems that we have everything to gain and nothing to lose, except perhaps for some fragile, internal perception of ourselves. While this article is written very broadly and the opening of all borders is by no means yet a thing which could happen practically in the near future, it does raise many interesting questions. What would be threatened by such an action? Our culture, our ‘way-of-life’? Surely not. More likely our homogeneity, our us-versus-them mentality, our racism, our xenophobia. We could be forced to become, as in the final words of the article, “a world unafraid of itself”. 

The Case for Getting Rid of Borders

Status: It's Complicated

It seems unimaginable even to me, a dial-up child of punch-card parents, that Cuba got its first experience of WiFi just last fall. It’s unimaginable for a lot of reasons, not greatest that Fidel ‘Just-to-darn-mean-to-die’ Castro really does have that tight a grip on his island nation, and not least that the rest of the world let their fear of him prevent them from reaching out to the people under his thumb for so long. The normalization of relations with Cuba was a long time coming; too long, if I am any judge. I know America as a nation can hold a long grudge, but I think better of the American people than I do of our country.

At least in this I have not been disappointed. Less than a year after Cuba was ushered into the wire-free echelons of the information age, our peoples have reached out to each other and made a new path out of Cuba, not by boat or by air but by friendly connections and a ring of satellites. At the incredible speed of social media, Cubans are finding their way north. Let’s hope this is only the first of many new things for our two nations. We may not be friends in the traditional sense of the word, but we are on Facebook.

Social Media to the US

Chasing the Vote

I feel like the most damaging thing about Donald Trump’s rise to power is how none of us can seem to stop talking about him. Every new outrageous thing he does just fuels the fire and gives him yet another round of free publicity. Goodness knows I’ve tried to keep from continually posting about him week after week, and if not about Trump directly then about the fears his rhetoric have stirred up in the American immigrant community, legal or otherwise, but I have found it to be virtually impossible. Here, at least, is something worthwhile that has come out of all this kerfluffle.

I found too many articles to count dealing with the number of legal residents in the US who have decided to naturalize in order to gain a voice against Trump—and a measure of safety from him, too, it must be said. I decided this was the best as it was from a very credible source, but I am a little saddened that I couldn’t share the one which featured an ad from an online naturalization service. It featured a featureless drawing of a little orange man with flyaway yellow hair and the caption: Scared? Don’t Be. 

Immigrants Naturalize to Vote

Stop-Gap

We talked about this in class, gosh, I don't even know how long ago, how the welcoming of immigrants actually improves the economy of the United States, contrary to popular belief. I'm just really pleased to have found such a great example of it in this article.

The biggest factor that was a surprise to me is the impact of immigrants on the changing demographics of America. I’ve been hearing for years that the Baby Boomers are retiring, that our population is getting older on the average, and that sooner or later we’ll have a lot more retirees than we have work force to replace them. Reading this article, which touts immigrants as a potential solution to this problem, was like a huge aha moment. Of course immigrants are good for our economy—they’re filling a gap.

This is an issue that’s close to my heart as I, too, hope to fill a gap in the near future. I’m going to a foreign medical school as the American schools are too full to take me. But the American schools also aren’t producing enough doctors to care for our aging population, so us American graduates of foreign medical schools are going to fill the gap—just like immigrants are doing elsewhere.

Welcoming Immigrants